Celebrating a
Deathday™: Mammoth, mercurial film-tard Orson Welles met his maker — "Maker's Mark®," if you will, and he did, with great gusto and thirst on a nearly daily basis for many years — on this day, October 10, 1985. Born
Björsson Wellesinki, son of a wealthy newspaper publisher in Norway, Orson and his twin brother Thörrsson lived a Hans
Brinker-like existence, ice skating and sledding about the snow-covered
countryside until their lives — and their steel-railed sleds — were turned upside
down with the death of their parents in a freak accident involving a
snow globe. The young twins were moved across the pond and raised by a cheese
wheel-making relation in Wisconsin — the Norway of the Americas™ — later moving to
Chicago, where they caught the radio theater bug, performing as the
improvisational duo Björsson and Thörrsson™ (pictured above) at the famed
Second City. After modifying his birth name, Orson went on to a career in stage and cinema, while Thörrsson
was content to stay in his brother’s giantine shadow, working as a set builder
and a stand-in on movie sets. Orson's love of fine cuisine — Italian wedding
soup, twice-baked potatoes, crumb-crisp-coated Findus® brand fish fingers — and drink — Mimosa's, White
Russians, Asti Spumanti® — eventually led him to set aside his belabored and
boring “Orwellian” film efforts for that of restaurateuring and wine-making. His
chain of Rosebud® restaurants — managed by boyhood chum Jan Stangdilan — hosted galas across
the celebratory spectrum and his Paul Masson® brand of rotgut wines were all
the rage in the 1970's, a taste-deprived era of loose morals and looser stools
not seen since the Roman Empire. Orson continued to make commercial appearances
until passing away on his palatial Xanadu estate. His brother Thörrsson would outlive his famous brother by nearly a decade, settling back home in Norway, near a certain fjord where the cod gathered in great shoals.
